Four weeks ago, Carol Morgan School did the public launch of the strategy we finished designing before summer. This week, we explored together how you turn the headlines into action on the ground, alongside senior and middle leaders.

The middle leaders are the most powerful people in a school.

A strategy is deceptively simple when you see those headlines. Underneath the façade of those headlines, there’s the reinforced concrete of objectives and measurable key results stretching about four or five years into the future.

Four or five years. That's a long time in a school. The high schoolers we listened to last year will have graduated from university. Some of the incredible staff we worked with will have moved on. Bylaws oblige that most of the Board will have changed. The timetable will have been rewritten more times than anyone cares to remember.

And yet, in a 90’ session, we were asking these middle leaders to start making that future happen, right now.

At first glance, it's an enormous ask. How do you take responsibility for something that's four or five years away, when you've barely got time to get through next Thursday?

But I asked them to do something quite different to normal.

We stopped thinking about the five-year plan as something to deliver, and started thinking about what they could achieve in the next ten weeks.

The clear objective and measurable key result that we wrote up before summer described the destination in 2032. We flipped the key result - the goal - into a question that we could answer. And then the middle leaders' job was to work out what their teams could do now to answer it.

In a 60-minute workshop, the planning became remarkably concrete. Their ideas were ambitious, certainly, but they were also feasible. They built on what teams were already doing, rather than adding another grand initiative to an already crowded workload.

Most importantly, they built out their own ideas.

Schools love the language of ownership.

We want teachers to own their professional development. We want students to own their learning. And we want middle leaders to own the implementation of our strategic plans.

But there's a contradiction here. There’s a problem with “giving people ownership”.

Often, when we say we want to give someone ownership, what we really mean is that we want to give them responsibility for delivering something we've already decided. We give them a damned to-do list.

There’s a reason strategic planning normally gets a cynical eyebrow raise from most people, and why there’s such disdain for spending any money on consultants to create one. Because normally, they’re just to-do lists. Expensive ones.

Normally, the senior team and Board identify the priorities, design the initiatives, work out the actions and set the deadlines.

Then they hand the plan over and say, "We'd like you to take ownership of this."

That's not really ownership. It's delegation. And it’s often not even strategy. It’s just expensive or long-term stuff that needs done.

But if we want middle leaders to become leaders of change, rather than managers of tasks, we need to give them something different: a meaningful problem to solve or question to answer.

Ambition needs freedom, yet freedom needs direction. Direction is what a well-written goal provides. Freedom is manageable within a ten-week sprint - the most damage someone can do if it all goes wrong is only ten weeks’ worth. And ambition needs fuelling - an ambitious, well-written strategy achieves that, by shining a spotlight on the unique capabilities the school wants to harness.

So back to Carol Morgan School, where we have all the right ingredients in place after creating their strategy together. Here’s what struck me this week:

In the space of an hour, 30 subject and year-group heads were able to understand a five-or-more-year goal, and translate it into a meaningful ten-week horizon that their teams can get excited about. I’ve ordered them to have a celebration of their inevitable success at the end of those ten weeks.

Within these boundaries, middle leaders can make their own decisions, draw on what they know about their colleagues, their students and the realities of their departments. They can identify opportunities that a senior leadership team might never spot. They could be ambitious without being unrealistic, and they could start on Monday.

This is a very different relationship between strategy and implementation.

Strategy isn't something developed at the top and delivered by everyone else. It becomes a shared direction and methodology, within which people at different levels of the school exercise their judgement and creativity.

The senior leadership team doesn't have to know every step of the journey.

But it does have to make the destination clear.

At your next middle leadership meeting, try a bit of NoTosh**:**

Instead of asking, "What actions are you going to take to implement our strategy?", start with three questions:

Where are we trying to get to? Make the long-term objective and measurable key result clear enough that everyone understands what success looks like, eventually.

What could your team realistically achieve in the next ten weeks? You’ll never achieve everything, so don’t try. And don’t attempt a miniature version of the five-year plan. Just work out one meaningful step forward that builds on what you're already doing.

What decisions do you need to be able to make yourselves? This might be the most important question of all. There's little point asking people to take ownership if every interesting decision still needs permission within the ten weeks that you’re trying to work swiftly - there’s a reason it’s called a sprint.

Then give the team space to work.

Come back together in ten weeks. That meeting should be less about checking whether tasks have been completed - people may have worked out in week one that the task they intended was actually the wrong thing to do, and changed tack accordingly. Instead, use the meeting to understand what's changed, what's been learnt and what should happen next.

The irony is that when we give middle leaders fewer instructions, we may get more meaningful action.

And perhaps that's the real test of leadership: how confidently can your teams make good decisions without you?